Blog

Great developers

[UPDATE: Fin has posted the full list of responses – great advice there!] What’s a great developer? An email went around recently asking a few people what they thought constituted a successful developer. My first thought was: did you mean successful or were really asking what is a great developer – since we all know a few lousy developers that have been very successful right? But...

SBTUG: Outsourcing + ASP.NET MVC + Prizes

This Wed at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we’re lucky enough to have Bob McGilvray and Tatham Oddie presenting.   When: This Wed 25 June 2008 Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm) Where: Microsoft, North Ryde Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388 Cost: Free (Pizza all provided) Plus: Prize: Full version of Visual Studio 2008 Standard & Windows Server 2008...

CLARITY: SQL Server 2008

One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There’s no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft’s products are no different. Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online – there’s no special insight here. Rather, I’ve just simply tried to distill a product to...

TECHED: Why crap tracks are great news

Last week we started seeing some of the TechEd Australia tracks being announced. Web is the first. There was a little bit of Twitter backlash and the odd blog post noting that the track might be missing an important topic or two. (I’ve deliberately not linked to any of the blogs or Twitter feeds in case I misrepresent people, but they are easy to find). Whether the track could be better...

SBTUG: Recap from last week

A big thank you to Aaron Saikovski for presenting on Groove and Catherine Eibner for demo-ing the MERGE keyword in SQL 2008. Andrew Coates and Roger Lawrence looked after us with their usual passion and generosity (and Rog videoed the demo). In case you didn’t know we post the news (and presentations if possible) on the SBTUG site – they are there going back to May last year.  ...

TIP: Mouse issues running Windows 2008 under Virtual PC 2007

This is exactly the same issue I mentioned in my VPC: Mouse issues running W2K3 under Virtual PC 2007 almost a year ago. But this time it’s with Windows 2008. Solution: Set Hardware Acceleration to Full Problem: My mouse movement was really sluggish in a VPC running Windows 2008 (and 2003, but other OSes are fine) Acknowledgement: Thanks to Paul Adare on the Microsoft Newsgroup for...

Microsoft’s new Green Strategy – it’s called Vista 64 bit

The Techies at Elcom completely reformatted my machine a few weeks back and installed Vista 64bit. This has been great because I can now access all 4GB of RAM (woo hoo!). But there’s been another unexpected benefit… It turns out that there’s no printer drivers for our Elcom printers that work on Vista 64. So, for the last 4 weeks I’ve been unable to print anything...

ELCOM: New product launch – Elcom TrainingManager.NET

We’re launching a new product this week. This Thursday morning to be exact. You may know that Elcom, where I work, is a web company that builds products for medium to large companies. We do intranets, extranets, portals, web sites, etc. Plus we do a fair bit of customisation. Over the last few months we’ve been turning things around a little and ‘productizing’ our custom...

SBTUG: Microsoft Groove 2007 + 2008 Stack + Prizes

This Wed at the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) we’re lucky enough to have Aaron Saikovski along to bring us up to speed on all things Microsoft Groove related. Oh, and check out the prizes…   When: This Wed 28 May 2008 Time: 6pm (until approx 8:30pm) Where: Microsoft, North Ryde Contact: Craig Bailey : 0413 489 388 Cost: Free (Pizza all provided) Plus: Prize:...

OPINION: The Death of Gen Y

The whole Gen Y thing really intrigues me. On one hand I think the concept behind Gen Y is a complete myth, and on the other I think there is something compelling we can learn from. In this post I cover the following: why Gen Y is a useless categorisation why I think the IT crash is coming soon why Gen Y will be especially disadvantaged, and some suggestions for how we can all best survive...

Archives